[Speakers] Regarding upcoming scheduled SVLUG speakers

[William R Ward]

Bill Kendrick writes:
>
>So, since we're on the topic of 'sales vs. tech' presentations, I figured
>I'd spend a moment going through the current round-up of speakers, to see
>what people think of them...
>
>April - Donald Becker, Penguin Computing, Linux Clustering
>  Don's CTO of Penguin, and worked on Beowulf and at NASA.
>  I'm guessing this should be nice and technical.

Yes - but we've seen a lot of focus on clustering lately.  I wouldn't
have scheduled this so soon after Qlusters, but it's too late now to
change that.

>May - David B Allen, Windows to Linux Migration Roadmap
>  David wrote a book on the subject.  'speakers' list members seemed
>  divided on whether we should accept his offer to speak.
>  My initial concern was that maybe he was just coming to sell copies of
>  his book, but someone on the 'speakers' list (Bill Ward? I forget) said
>  that they knew him, or had seem him speak, or something, and that it should
>  be fine.

Wasn't me, but it sounds like a good topic.

>June - Speaker from OSDL
>  No idea what's up with this.  I need to go back and confirm or cancel this.

Yes, we should definitely get some more details before deciding on this.

>July - Atul Tulshibagwale, Trustgenix, Federated Identity Management
>  We just discussed this one on the 'officers' list.
>  I think we should be fine, but some folks have some concern...

We did?  I couldn't find it in the past few months' email.  What is
the concern?

>August - Christian Hammond, GNUpdate & Gaim, Galago, desktop notifications, IM
>  J. Paul and I both know Christian.  He's just an OSS developer geek like us,
>  and will be talking about OSS projects.

OK.

>September - Kyle Rankin, Knoppix Tech. Talk
>  Kyle is president of NBLUG, and has spoke there and at LUGOD, and people
>  have thoroughly enjoyed his presentations.  He did happen to write a book
>  ("Knoppix Hacks") for O'Reilly, but he'll be here to talk tech, not sell
>  books.

He talked at PenLUG recently.  Sounds like a good choice.  Try to get
some copies of Knoppix to hand out at the meeting.

>October - Open Vote Foundation and/or BlackBoxVoting.org
>  These guys spoke at LUGOD recently.  Both speakers were kinda... quirky...
>  but they're non-profit folks working on important issues, so this should
>  be fine, too.

What do you mean by quirky?

>As with my experience as speaker coordinator for LUGOD, the folks we
>invite are typically FAR less concern than the folks who contact us to see
>if they can come speak.

Yes - because when we invite them we generally have some idea what
they're about.

>Should we perhaps make it a rule to not accept solicitations without some
>sort of [mailing list] member voting process?  (As for speakers I/we go out
>and find outselves, I/we can just accept the lashings from the audience after
>bad talks. ;^) )

I think it would be good to have a little discussion before making a
decision.  Also since you've done a great job of finding speakers for
the next few months, we're in no hurry to book speakers.  We can
afford to be a little more picky since the next open slot is November.

--Bill.

-- 
William R. Ward - Vice President, Silicon Valley Linux Users Group